New Year's Day, 2001

There were seven of us staying at the Mama D'Anna Bungalows, which we all simply called Mommy Diana's. Steve and Luke were from England, Bessy was from Switzerland, Molly was Russian, and the new guy sounded French. And there was Hugh and I, adding much-needed volume to an otherwise silent crowd. Everyone had endured the long, kidney-wrenching bus trip to Sumatra's north-west tip strictly for the surfing except us. We had taken the detour to Banda Aceh after deciding it was too early to catch the boat to Malaysia from Medan when we had three weeks still left on our Indonesian visa.

Hugh joined the surfers each morning, floating above the jagged coral on a borrowed board, while I dove off the coastline with my mask and snorkel. I had learned several painful lessons about surfing as a rookie in Australia and enjoyed swimming down among the colorful fish and ominous caverns much more than treating infected wounds with hydrogen peroxide for weeks after falling on sharp coral.

We had all rung in the new year with expensive Bintang beers the night before. The Indonesians didn't really celebrate the occasion, and today had the general feeling of any of the eighteen say spent in Lokna, located about ten kilometers west of Aceh. Besides, there were more important events taking place at the moment. There was a civil war waging between Indonesia's army and Aceh's GAM, who sought independance for their secluded and unique province. The bus we had rode for a full day to get to Aceh from Medan had been stopped well over twenty times by "polisi" and nationalists, who never paid any attention to the two white guys dressed in Rip Curl shorts with Canadian flags sewn on the packs next to them.

Shortly after arriving in Lokna, a messenger drove up on a moped and spoke with Mommy in the rapid Acehenese dialect, a language Hugh and I found vastly different from the Indonesian standard we'd spent so much time studying. Mommy later informed us the roads, ferry, and airport in Aceh were closed until the conflict subsided. We both shrugged and agreed it was hardly a bad spot to be stranded.

For dinner, Mommy surprised us all with a New Year's feast. A whole tuna secretly baked using heated stones in an underground oven behind the main cabin was carried out by her sons during our daily ping-pong tournament. We helped ourselves to the steaming white meat with our hands and soon were all groaning and holding our bellies. One by one, everyone stumbled to the nearest sheltered hammock to digest the feast while the gentle rain turned to a violent downpour.

Mommy visited each of us throughout the afternoon and spoke softly while pushing our hammock back and forth in a soothing rythm. Her three teenage children, who displayed none of the shy characteristics typical of Indonesians, bounced from cabin to cabin, their laughs heard over the deafening rain.

It was growing dark when I heard Mommy's footsteps approach my bungalow along the rough wood planks of the deck. I looked up and returned the wide smile beaming down at me. She sat and didn't speak for several minutes, rocking me ever so slightly in the mesh hammock. Then Mommy asked me when I had last talked to my family. I told her that it had been over a month ago while I was in Bali, Indonesia's most developed island that thrived on tourism. She left briefly then returned with a note written in Achenese. Mommy pointed to a path at the far end of the courtyard and gave me several left and right turns to commit to memory. She passed me a flashlight and I jogged off through the warm rain.

Several minutes later I came to a short metal tower with a tiny shack at its base. I knocked and the door opened almost immediately, a small hand waving me inside the dimly lit room. An elderly man smiled widely, and when I couldn't respond to his fast chatter I passed him the note Mommy had given me. He read it, nodded, and led me to a table in the corner. He turned a few dials, spoke to someone through a microphone after slipping on some headphones, then passed the large foam discs to me.

A woman asked me what country I would like to reach in poor English and I suddenly understood what I was doing there. I gave her my mother's phone number and after several clicking noises followed by static I heard a faint ring. Mom answered, I repeatedly assured her that both sides in the Aceh conflict had no interest in me, and told her I'd call from Malaysia. The man smiled, turned the dials again, and showed me to the door.

A week later Hugh had to take the twenty-minute ride into town to extend his Indonesian travel visa. I had arrived in the country six days later than him after catching a bus to Singapore hoping to cure my stomach aches with Western-style food, so my passport was valid for an extra week. We rode through the city in a speeding tuk-tuk, a three-wheeled motorized taxi designed to seat three Indonesians comfortably but cramped quarters for two Canadians. Hugh had felt sick for a couple days and hadn't slept much, so he dozed off with his head slumped on my shoulder. The tuk-tuk driver suddenly realized he'd passed the street leading to the government office we requested, and did a sharp u-turn. I couldn't grab Hugh in time as he flew out the open side of the taxi toward the ground.

I hollered for the driver to stop and we looked back in horror at Hugh sprawled out on the road. He slowly got up clutching his chin, and I could see blood streaming down as I ran over. He moved his hand and a deep chunk of flesh flapped open below his mouth with small rocks and dirt stuck inside. I looked at the road and cringed; black pools of water and petroleum filled the cracks of the loose bits of concrete and mud. I told the driver to get us to the hospital as fast as he could. Hugh held a spare shirt the driver had in the dash-sized trunk of the tuk-tuk until we pulled up to a weathered building with a red cross painted on the door.

There was an elderly woman in a bed on wheels near the entrance. Her face was badly bruised, her limbs swollen to twice their normal size, and several bags fed an I.V. drip beside the bed. The four men dressed in white hovering over her looked up and quickly rushed to offer their shoulders for Hugh to lean on as he stumbled in swearing. They seemed to forget about the injured woman, who we later learned had been hit by a car.

We were escorted to a back room with a fresh pool of blood drying on the floor near one of the five beds. A woman quickly rushed ahead of us and frantically threw a towel in the dark red puddle, crouching over it to block our view of the mess. The four medics rushed around collecting shringes and jars labelled with ink on masking tape. One man picked the rocks out of Hugh's chin with tweezers while another squirted a clear disinfectant on the wound. A third man threaded a curved needle then began stitching the gash together. I felt my stomach churn after the second stitch and looked at the ceiling while Hugh repeatedly asked how bad it looked.

When the last of eight stitches had been tied off we walked to the front room and shook hands with a dozen uniformed hospital staff that had gathered after hearing a North American was in their building. The Indonesian embassy had sent notices a week earlier to each foreigner in Aceh with advice on crossing the conflict zone to Medan. We were two of only thirteen travellers currently in the city of sixty thousand that had to be sent one of these letters, which explained why we received so much attention everywhere we went.

After leaving the hospital and escorted down Aceh's main street, a large white mosque blasted sacred Koran prayers from speakers mounted on its high peak . It was now the Muslim's Ramadan, a time to resist the temptations enjoyed the rest of the year and make personal sacrifices for their faith. After the tsunami this week, that very same mosque was the only structure remaining in downtown Aceh, surrounded by a sea of debris and destruction. The shoreline near Mommy Diana's was one of the closest sections of land to the measured 9.0 earthquake's epicenter and certain to have suffered horribly as well.

A thin man from Aceh choked back tears of grief on CNN as he told the television camera that his entire family was lost. He couldn't imagine living without his beloved wife, he said, and fell to his knees. The broadcast cut him off and switched quickly to a handsome man in a suit. Larry King asked him if the death toll had risen since he last asked ten minutes before. Larry asked if the corpses stunk, and wondered why America should send so much money for aid when other countries hadn't helped the U.S. after the hurricanes in Florida. Larry wanted to know if we could expect another tsunami in the coming days and if disease would make the number of dead top a hundred thousand.

If Larry King had met Mommy Diana and her Aceh neighbours, he would have left the studio and gone home upon word of their fate. He'd sit in the silence of his living room and remember those spirited people who lost their lives and not concern himself with the future of their tourist industry. If the forces of nature were fair and just, the tsunami would instead have roared into Larry King's fancy studio, his lone death hardly worth mentioning on that night's newscast.